The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (48 page)

If Chavez’s confidence wavered, he never let on. “I don’t ever get tired
⁴
of fighting the Teamsters,” Chavez said. “That is what you are here for, so it is not work, and you don’t get tired.” The closer people were to him, the more they believed; the more they believed, the greater their outrage against the doubters. Hartmire wrote a response to the
New York Times
called “The United Farm Workers Are Alive and Well” and circulated the mailing widely to movement supporters.

The day after the
New York Times
Magazine
piece appeared, Chavez boarded a plane for London. He had completed three tours of boycott cities within the United States, looking for the next great villain that would help him break through one more time. He had negotiated a deal with Meany, who refused to support the secondary boycott because his federation could not sanction a boycott of stores where union members worked as clerks and butchers. Chavez agreed to boycott only specific produce in exchange for an endorsement from the AFL-CIO, a potentially important boost for the grape and lettuce boycott. Now he headed to meetings with European unions to talk about blocking the produce overseas.

Chavez received a cautious, disappointing response. “I don’t think the trip was as successful as I thought it was going to be,” he said on the plane ride home. “I kidded myself
⁵
along the way that it was just like sweeping money with a broom, but far from that.” In a dozen speeches
⁶
and press conferences in London, Oslo, Stockholm, Geneva, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Paris, Chavez was asked how many members were in the union, why he had lost the contracts, and what he expected from Europeans. He explained the trouble was a lack of labor laws in the fields and the collusion between the growers and the Teamsters. He blamed the Nixon White House. He claimed that fifteen hundred people worked full-time on the boycott (there were no more than five hundred at the height during summer), which was so successful that growers now looked to Europe as a place to “dump grapes.” He struggled to explain the unique nature of his union, so different from the well-established trade unions he addressed.

If the response from labor groups was underwhelming, the reception in Rome more than made up for any disappointment. Chavez was in Stockholm, due to fly in two days to Rome, when Monsignor George Higgins found out that Chavez had been granted an audience with the Pope the next morning. The last flight for Rome had already departed Stockholm. After hours of phone calls, Chavez finally found an evening flight to London that connected to a Nigerian Air flight to Rome. They landed at 2:00 a.m., Chavez recounted, “and there stood Monsignor Higgins
⁷
in this big empty airport with his nose up against the window, and when he saw us he made a sign of the cross and uttered a sigh of relief.”

A few hours later, Cesar and Helen, with Higgins and Bishop Donnelly, observed the pontiff’s public audience from a balcony at the Vatican, and then had a fifteen-minute private meeting. Pope Paul VI commended both Chavez and the work of the Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Farm Labor, then spoke about the importance of the Mexican American community. The Pope gave Helen rosaries and medals for the kids. Cesar gave the Pope a large UFW flag with the black eagle and the word huelga sewn across the red banner. The pope asked what the word meant as the Vatican photographer took pictures of the group with the flag. (Strikes were rampant in Italy, and the Vatican never released that picture.)

At a meeting of the pontiff’s Council for Justice and Peace the next day, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, one of the top officials in the Vatican, surprised the gathering when he pulled a statement out of his pocket to add his own commendation: “We are all indeed grateful to Mr. Chavez for the lesson which he brings to our attention. It is a very important lesson: to know how to be conscious of the terrible responsibility that is incumbent on us who bear the name ‘Christian.’ His entire life is an illustration of this principle.”

After a day of sightseeing (“I fell in love with Rome”), Chavez’s party drove the winding roads to Assisi, where a bishops’ synod had convened. Addressing the group, Chavez said simply: “We’ve experienced some of our greatest joy the last two days here in Rome . . . We were overjoyed
⁸
with the audience, just more than we’d ever hoped we’d get.”

On the flight home, Chavez tried to articulate his feelings about meeting the Pope. “It’s such a personal experience that I have difficulty expressing it . . . To us, to Catholics generally, he is probably the most important person in the world. Not only religiously but also historically. So we were elated.” Chavez was particularly gratified that the Pope had made favorable comments about Mexican Americans. “It was recognition for us,
⁹
and a tremendous joy. Something I never thought would happen.”

While Chavez was enjoying encomiums from the Catholic hierarchy, back at home Manuel Chavez launched a project decidedly not in keeping with his cousin’s saintly image and steadfast commitment to nonviolence. As soon as Cesar left the United States, Manuel set up the “wet line,” a private UFW patrol along the Arizona border designed to stop workers who routinely crossed illegally in search of work. The philosophy behind the wet line (as in “wetbacks,” the common term for those who crossed the border illegally) was consistent with the union’s position that illegal immigrants should be blocked from working as strikebreakers. Ostensibly, the wet line existed to strengthen a citrus strike in the Yuma lemon groves by convincing Mexicans who might work as scabs to turn around and stay home. But the UFW night patrols did not stop to ask Mexicans walking across the open border where they planned to work, nor did the private patrol use verbal persuasion on those tempted to scab. By the time Cesar was en route home from his audience with the Pope, stories had begun to surface about widespread violence and beatings along the wet line.

With union money and some additional support from Chris Hartmire’s credit card, Manuel Chavez purchased seventeen tents and set them up along twenty-five miles of the border, near the city of San Luis, Mexico. He enlisted fifteen crews to patrol the border in three shifts, paying $60 a week to about three hundred people. Anna Puharich, Cesar’s trusted fund-raiser who had been running the Service Center, moved to the border to manage a special “payment team” that Cesar set up for his cousin. As the union rapidly depleted its reserve accounts, Manuel spent $80,000 a week
¹⁰
on the wet line and the lemon strike.

A steady drumbeat of stories about violence appeared in the
Yuma Daily Sun
. On October 8, a seventeen-year-old crossing illegally reported being beaten by a UFW patrol; on October 11, five cars were torched and a lemon picker was attacked with a blackjack; on October 13, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican said he was stopped by three men just north of the border, who beat him with a hose and stole $10; on October 21, two workers told sheriff’s deputies they were robbed of border crossing cards, $350 and their car; the same day, deputies found a man hiding under a bush, nude, who said he had been taken from a grove by three men. On November 10, two men were beaten, one whipped with a plastic hose, the other burned on the soles of his feet, then thrown in the Colorado River.

The Mexican papers carried stories about more pervasive violence on their side of the border. In San Luis, newspapers reported that cars were firebombed daily, houses set on fire, and families threatened. On November 30, 1974,
La Voz
, a Mexicali paper, reported thirty-seven confirmed beatings. Another Mexicali paper,
La Tribuna
, published pictures of victims who said they were beaten by the “
cesarchavistas
.”

The willingness of illegal immigrants to voluntarily report crimes to U.S. authorities, generally unsympathetic to the migrants’ status, reflected the severity of the violence. The Mexican labor federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), which had worked closely with Manuel for years and initially supported his lemon strike, broke with the UFW and denounced the wet line
¹¹
as a campaign of terror. CTM director Francisco Modesto estimated there were hundreds of beatings, most unreported, and that two men had been castrated and one drowned in the river. “They had control of San Luis,” he told a reporter. “They bought off the police
¹²
. . . even the taxi drivers were under Manuel’s control.”

In Yuma, citrus growers went to court seeking injunctions against the strike. Witnesses testified that a radio station rejected ads from growers after eight employees received threats from the UFW. One picker suffered a broken neck when he was pulled out of a tree. Buses used to transport workers were gutted with gasoline bombs. Oscar Mondragon, one of the strike leaders, was charged with setting fire to labor contractors’ buses in the Imperial Valley. Police described the simple mechanism:
¹³
a cigarette taped to a matchbook formed a makeshift fuse, which was placed in a plastic water bottle one-quarter full of gasoline. Mondragon and two other UFW workers were convicted after testimony that they poured gasoline on the hood of the bus, placed the bottle on top, and lit the cigarette. When the cigarette burned, it ignited the matchbook, which melted the plastic and set the gasoline on fire. The same brands of water bottle and matches were found in other arson investigations.

Hundreds of miles away, in the quiet sanctuary of La Paz, Manuel’s reports to the executive board at its October and December 1974 meetings were upbeat. The lemon strike was shutting down the fields, costing the growers thousands of dollars, he reported. In his gruffly charming manner, Manuel provided entertaining accounts
¹⁴
and urged board members to visit Yuma and see for themselves the damaged trees and empty lemon groves. He was certain the growers would soon capitulate. They were losing money, and the weight of the overripe fruit was causing permanent damage to the trees. “We don’t win this one,” he told the board, “we’ll never win a strike!”

The only reference Manuel made to violence along the border was a passing mention of a recent court case. In another example of the ridiculous nature of justice in Arizona, he said, two UFW members of the wet line were convicted of beating three illegals and robbing one of $227. How could an illegal have been carrying that much money? Manuel asked. He did not mention that at the trial, the victims testified they were beaten with sticks and a battery cable. “There is no justification for stopping these people, robbing them, beating them and throwing them back across the line,” Judge William Nabours said, sentencing the men to probation. “If I thought for a minute sending you to prison would stop this activity, I wouldn’t hesitate . . . This sort of activity has got to stop.”
¹⁵

At the CTM’s instigation, Mexican authorities from the state of Sonora conducted an investigation that concluded San Luis city officials had been bribed to cooperate with the UFW. At the executive board meeting in December 1974, both Manuel and Cesar tacitly acknowledged
¹⁶
the truth of the bribery allegation. Cesar asked Manuel how he could cut expenses.

manuel
: If we can get some people to man the lines on the other [Mexican] side of the border, police it. Because we’ve got them very well under control now. But if we turn down the tents, they’ll flock in. Maybe we ought to leave the tents . . . and just sort of bluff. But then we have to put surveillance on the other side . . .

cesar
: How much if you got Mexican people to do it over there?

manuel
: If we pay the police over there on the other side—which they accused us of already anyway—like we had before, we had five of them guys doing it, just going back and forth, if they catch any illegals, they take them in, and then they just get them away from the line, then we don’t have as many people on this side. But we can’t stop that line completely. Once they get into those groves, they sleep in them . . .

cesar
: Can you cut the line down to 100, on this side? And then put . . .

manuel
: Yes, then we got to pay at least three shifts . . .

And then he asked that the tape recorder be shut off.

After an inquiry that included hearings where men testified about a range of brutal incidents, the Sonoran Judicial Department issued arrest warrants—including, according to Mexican news reports, one for Manuel Chavez. Manuel offered a different explanation to the executive board. The growers had bought off the Mexican authorities and the CTM, he said. Then
El
Malcriado
had the poor judgment to write something critical about the Mexican president, so the irate government picked Manuel up and held him in jail
¹⁷
for three days. With rampant corruption in Mexico, the story was plausible enough to pass.

But even with allowances for Mexican corruption and one-party rule, the evidence was overwhelming. News reports, official complaints, and investigations on both sides of the border confirmed the victims’ stories and documented the pattern of brutality. So did the similar scars on the backs of victims beaten with chains, and the stories of workers beaten with hoses, robbed of petty cash, stripped of clothes, and left naked in the desert.

“The moment Manuel came here, he started buying everybody off,”
¹⁸
Enrique Silva Calles of the San Luis district attorney’s office told a reporter. Calles said he had a stack of complaints about Manuel involving bad checks, burnt cars, and beaten bodies. “What I can’t understand,” he said, “is that Cesar Chavez continues to reward that son of a bitch. He knows about the checks and the complaints against Manuel. Why is he still supporting him?”